Fixing a Viewer's BROKEN Gaming PC? - Fix or Flop S3:E18

this here is another viewer's broken gaming PC and uh well it's got a big problem it turns on and then immediately turns back off that's kind of what the viewer told me just to doesn't power on for very long that sounds like a pretty serious issue long story short and this viewer upgraded a few components uh the graphics card for one I believe this is an RTX 3070 and uh I'm hoping that's not the problem and then also these case fans so before the upgrades were thrown in the computer supposedly worked just fine after the upgrades were included that's when the powering on issue started so again it's either a user error situation which I would actually hope for because if it's something that's just miswired that's a very quick fix it won't cost us anything but if it is a component problem I'm hoping it's the fans to blame and not the graphics card because this thing is super expensive and I don't have another 30 70 lying around to replace for free so we'll see by the end of this one though I'm still hoping that we can have the system back up and running for him all right are you ready for this one stick around stay with me to get rid of that annoying Windows activation Watermark head on over to VIP SCD key purchase a Windows 10 Pro OEM key for a fraction of the price of retail just see the secure payment method like PayPal enter your product key into your PC settings window and say bye to The Watermark and be sure to use our offer code skgs for a sew wheat discount I've just got to say a quick side note here holy GPU sag this thing uh it's it's it's not horizontal that's for sure I think we're gonna have to throw in a little uh prop here form I've got a few that I ordered just for cases like this because the SAG is pretty rough I mean it should be something like that and it just it hangs I mean that's like a full degree maybe two degrees of sag there so yeah we'll take care of that for him hey there and welcome to fix or Flop if you're new here check out the video description it'll have infos how all this works just know that everything we do is free of charge including replacing components it's because of your viewership and The Cone inciting relationships that we've built with vendors with manufacturers of components like motherboards cases Etc because of your viewership that we're able to do this so thank you again for that support just watching videos like this even if you have ad blocker on you know at the end of the day it still helps to have that viewership stack up each video so thank you for that but for now we need to get started with this rig and what I'm going to do is power it on first or at least attempt to and see if we can't replicate what the owner is describing essentially the system either turning on and off right away or not turning on at all it's important that we start here and that we have a baseline because as a PC technician whatever you want to call what this is this role that I'm playing it's important that I'm on the same page as the owner of the rig the owner could have told me something completely different than what's actually happening and if I don't gather that data for myself if I don't see it with my own eyes I might be led down rabbit holes that have nothing to do with the actual issue and I might not even be able to solve the problem at the end of the day so power on at the rear okay we are getting LEDs I do see LEDs at the rear of the motherboard let's see if we get power nope so that's weird we're getting RGB uh LEDs in the dram those are lighting up but we're not getting power like no no power at all the system doesn't want to power on let's try the power button behind here still nothing so I'm basically just forcing a manual power on scenario and the rig just doesn't want to turn on Okay this looks like it could potentially be a wiring issue one of the first things I want to check so let's see what we've got here I I'm still a bit suspicious with regards to this wiring now Jesus there's actually there's actually a lot of zip tying going on here all this connections do look sound I've even kind of tinkered with front i o a bit just to make sure that wasn't miswired he did have polarity for his hard drive LED uh backwards I fixed that form but it still wouldn't post uh we've got let's see the 24 pin is completely connected it's loaded all the way in uh same goes for the eight pin EPS up top this here looks good so what I'm going to do now is disconnect everything non-vital so we're going to start with these USB cables down here front i o we're going to disconnect his Sata cable SATA data cables and much of the AIO stuff behind the motherboard tray we're not going to keep the system on long we just want to see if that will fix any of these issues also notice he's missing like so he's missing his HD audio cable for some reason even though this case does support HD audio unless it's wired somewhere else I'm not familiar with and then he's also missing his USB 3.0 connection which you should also get with this case so uh there's some things we need to do after the fact as well for this rig but of course even with only the 24 pin 8-pin EPs and two supplemental a pins for the graphics card connected the system is still exhibiting the same symptom whereby the lights are just turning on but we don't actually get power like there's literally no response from this platform so the next thing I'm going to do is remove the graphics card and try powering it on then the graphic sword is very easy to remove and it's one of the reasons why I'm going to tackle it as early as we are I've already cleared the CMOS I've already checked that the ram is seated correctly if removing the card doesn't fix the issue we'll tackle ddr4 just by replacing those dims with a known working dim from my stash if that still doesn't work then we will have to test the power supply although I don't expect the power supply it's the it's the culprit here because we are getting power at least to some extent as long as you're covering all your bases regardless of the order I think it's best just to pick the things that are easier to check first so let's get to that graphics card so out she comes two cables disconnected we the screws removed at the rear and we'll do a quick physical inspection of what we can see on this card I don't see any burn marks around the gold fingers at the base of the card the two eight pins look to be pretty clean again we can't see much else because of the back plate and obviously the uh the cooling shroud but uh yeah all of his ports everything looks okay the card wasn't powering on at all we weren't getting fan spinning or anything when we were attempting to power the system on so I don't think this is the issue but we do need to check and Rule it out uh oh uh oh it powered on right away that's not a good sign um I'm pretty surprised by this but it does look like the system is at least trying to some extent to post which is way better off the movie before I think it's training memory now because it's been off for so long and there were Hardware changes apparently made so we we should I don't want to leave it on for too long because again I've disconnected pretty much everything including the pump but there we go so we're in the Bios that was our issue uh the CPU obviously has integrated Graphics I don't know what CPU it is but we've got the HDMI cable wired into the motherboard and we have picture so that tells me that it is more than likely the card since it was the only thing we changed between the last run and this one to triple check though I'm going to plug this into a separate rig and uh yeah make sure that it is in fact the issue it would uh not be good of us to assume that without double checking somewhere else so let's do that right now 12 seconds later right so here is how we're going to confirm this I'm going to let the camera run the entire time so that you see uh that I'm not manipulating things between Clips not that I expect you to think that about what we do here but just to show you how I'm doing it in real time so I've got the power supply on now and I'm going to Joe do I have to jump no I have a physical power switch here so power on looks good wait a minute this uh this shouldn't be happening what why is the system posting why is it even powering on and why wasn't it in his rig okay this could be a power supply problem his card is actually okay see and that's why it's always important to triple check your work even when you think something is to blame you always have to double check it somewhere else with totally separate variables because uh well we could have ended up telling this guy at a dead graphics card when in reality it worked perfectly fine could it be these cables that are bad or maybe a rail on the power supply that's bad we're gonna find out and would you look at that holy cow this unit is totally cooked with the exception of one five volt lead it looks like everything else a 12 volt lines are all shot so that might explain why the rgbs were Illuminating just a low power 5 volt here but nothing was turning on the higher power stuff the 12 volt stuff looks like those rails are cooked so this power supply needs to be uh yeah needs to be replaced Big Time hold on hold on wait a minute am I I'm getting Whiplash here why on Earth would the system post without a graphics card installed if why would it work if I if all I did was remove the card why does that suddenly make the power supply work again but then when I hook it up to my tester it fails that doesn't make a lot of sense so the same as before when I power the power supply on WE immediately get fails across the board right it looks like the entire unit is cooked and that's no good but check this out all I'm going to do is disconnect the PCI 6 pin that was wired in that's the same cable that runs into the graphics card and then we'll power cycle once more and look at there no errors except for obviously the 12 volt PCI cable we disconnected it's noticing that it's not getting power through there and that's because I just disconnected it but everything else with these well these ripples are pretty bad um otherwise though the unit is fine which is why I powered on before so there's either an issue with that pcie cable or an issue with that connector on the unit itself so we're going to try a different plug and see if that fixes it now to be clear the power supply is going to be replaced regardless I'm not a fan of that Ripple or slew rate so we're going to just outright remove it from the equation to ensure that uh well things run healthily for a few more years at least despite this rig being a bit older it otherwise is a very healthy combination of Hardware 9th gen Intel and a 3070 will last you a very long time depending on the games you play so I'm only doing this just because I'm curious about what the actual culprit is as to why the card works on that platform but not here but then the rest of the rig works here with that cord removed so I'm going to swap ports and give it another shot with the graphics card installed again well that didn't work the system still refuses to power on so it's very likely there's something internally wrong with the power supply AI that I'm not going to be able to fix here I'd rather just replace the unit outright with a frankly better one anyway one that hopefully has less Ripple as well this could potentially be an issue of an incorrect cable set I can't confirm that this cable set is the correct one to use with this Corsair power supply I don't have flight that info right in front of me but if this is not the correct cable kit then you should not be running this with a different unit especially from a different manufacturer you'll have all the different wires in the wrong PIN places the wrong pin out could result in you know reverse current flow you have ground where you should have a 12 volt Etc and you could cause some very big problems just ask me how I know and just in case you're wondering the system doesn't boot up with the card in the lower full length slot and it doesn't boot up with a different card entirely connected as long as these cables are being used we have no power at all so that is um well with the exception of the five volt it's just really really weird all around so let's go and get power supply out of here and we'll go and upgrade them at the same time by the way a bit of backstory it never hurts to ask a few questions of the owner and what they maybe did before they dropped it off with you because if I had known what I know now I probably wouldn't have tested the card first I would have tested the power supply he told me that he took this card out of his rig and put it in his brothers and it worked just fine well what do you know I mean we confirmed the same thing we put this in a makeshift test bench and it worked just fine so you don't have to interrogate owners you know you don't you don't want to put them up to a lie detector and who are you telling the truth the whole truth nothing but the truth you don't need to do that but any sort of context might save you a bit of time in the troubleshooting process so just Yeah the more you know that is uh that's a that's a lot of zip ties and this isn't even all of them the new unit going in is an NZXT c1000 kind of a fitting because this is also an NZXT case with some Razer branding let's get it wiggle this mass of cables all the way through he was missing a few and had to use a few uh cable splices and things before so I made sure to connect a bit more than we probably need just in case he wants to add even more peripherals later on I've got this tightened down here at the back and we can begin the wiring process all over again uh oh Leah's crying four she seems upset meanwhile phew okay that I believe is it for cable management I might have missed something but we'll triple check when we power the system on I think all of the SATA connections are sound uh I'm not missing anything obvious all right now we're gonna attempt to Cable manage this mess and uh we're just gonna skip straight to it three two one ah yeah it's not my best work but it'll do it'll do now we'll slide this graphics card back in nice and gently there we go we'll wire things up here I have two separate eight pins now running to the card probably wouldn't matter too much for a 30 70 but we're gonna do it anyway all right all right and here is what we're working with so um pretty clean still I'm I don't really like the way that the cables or the tubes I should say from the AIO run to the block the block is also turning 90 degrees clockwise and it's kind of bothering me but it's the way he did it I'm not going to change that but I really like the way that the card now sits with the uh little bracket that we included here it's just a cheap easy I think it's easy DIY is the name of the brand I'll have it linked below if you want to fix the old graphics card sag on the cheap it just sits underneath the Shroud and props it up a bit so pretty nice there we are ready to power on will a replacement power supply be the answer to our problems I have a pretty good feeling it will be so let's uh Let's cross our fingers here power at the rear looks good let's try power up front let's drive power up front there we go okay everything seems to be working right out of the gate except for the two front fans for the radiator and it boots up very quickly as well holy dust oh about to sneeze any second now nope no sneeze come on let's see we have any yeah oh yes okay we have one one SATA power cable I knew if there was any cable I was gonna miss it was gonna be say to power there's like 10 of these back here and that's not an exaggeration let's see if that fixes it yes those fans are spinning now that's good news uh the pump is also making a weird knocking sound it sounds like there's air in the pump so yes oh that goes away so we just gotta do a little bit of shake and bake hopefully this AIO has a bit uh a bit more life left in it I don't know how old it is but that knocking definitely isn't good for it assuming it's what I think it is which is air trapped in there so she's got to wiggle the case around a bit while it's on to get those air bubbles in the radiator and if that still doesn't work then what the viewer can do is flip this uh radiator upside down so the tubes are down here and uh after a bit more rotating he might be able to get the air trapped at the top of the radiator instead of in the pump chamber one other thing you'll notice I did off camera here was zip tie the tubing to the top of the case and I actually did it through one of the fan holes that you would normally thread a screw through and that keeps things looking a bit more clean when you're looking at it from the side totally optional and again it's probably not going to last much longer because this thing is still knocking a bit when the when sitting upright again I'll just show you here the sound it makes so if we just set it like that there you go you can hear just a faint knocking sound coming from the Block so I've told the viewer about it and uh he knows it'll probably need to flip this around I'm not sure if it'll go away on its own though and I'm not going to leave it on long enough to figure that out it's not a super sensitive issue at this point but something that might need to be addressed a bit later and if you're quickly showing the good guys over at Corsair what was actually happening with the AIO they offered to replace it free of charge for the owner and they're actually going to mail it out to them like tonight as we speak so pretty awesome stuff we'll have to worry about anything there well this was a bit of a roller coaster yeah I initially thought it was a card and turns out I was wrong I'm glad I was wrong I'm glad that we tested after the fact and triple checked our work before turning it into the teacher right you don't want to replace a card only to find out that the card actually wasn't to blame to begin with and this is not a cheap card by any means so the fact that it was the power supply and that it didn't actually kill from what it seems like any component in here is a good thing I'm not going to bother taking apart this unit because well it's not all that expensive at this point I found out when I revealed to the owner what the issue was that this was actually RMA a couple of years ago for an issue related to power delivery obviously and uh so yeah that knowing that info ahead of time might have also helped me a bit but it is what it is I'm I mean if we if we open this up and found what the culprit was I still wouldn't recommend trying to replace it it's just going to take a lot of time having to Source whatever part you need a source and then actually the labor going into replacing that part soldering or what have you you might as well just buy another unit they're only like between 50 and 100 bucks usually a decent power supply you could obviously spend more than that and the one that's in here I think is worth a bit more than that but I just wanted to set them up for a few more years he's got more breathing room from a wattage standpoint a great efficiency as well great warranty through NZXT and it all looks really clean again I really like the way that this card sits now it's no longer sagging that's like if if we didn't fix anything else about this rig the sagging issue is I mean at the very least a very aesthetically pleasing addition to this rig with that if you guys enjoyed watch watching this one be sure to let me know give this one a thumbs up that would be greatly appreciated consider subscribing if you have not already consider supporting us on patreon you can join our public Discord server that's totally free and yeah I'll catch you in the next one my name is Greg thanks for learning with me

Channel: Greg Salazar

Views: 144,432

Keywords: fix or flop, broken pc, how to fix, how to, how to fix a broken gaming pc, broken gaming pc, greg salazar fix or flop, how to fix a pc, how to troubleshoot, broken computer, greg salazar, pc no post, pc wont post, pc doesnt turn on, fixing a pc, how to fix a pc that wont boot up, fix or flop season 3, Computer repair, how to troubleshoot pc, season 3, close call, fix or flop close call, fof close call, fix or flop s3, pc doesn't power on, pc issue, computer issue

Id: 4vvIrBPPiWQ

Length: 19min 12sec (1152 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 03 2023